I’m not really well-versed in computer building, and my understanding of computer hardware is limited. But I have successfully upgraded computers on my own in the past through doing research on the internet. The current machine I’m using, I bought about 6 years ago, and the time is coming to buy a new one. I want to be able to play next gen games, while not spending so much in the process of building a decent gaming PC. I took a look at an article that Forbes posted. It claims to have a list of hardware that can deliver premium quality graphics and processing for a low cost of $750. I want to hear what the techie people on the forum think about this item list.

At that price, you are better off waiting for the new consoles. PC gaming is only viable if you buy at least 1000$ PCs. A mid-range PC will not keep up with a console IMO because optimizations are so much easier on consoles because they all use the exact same hardware. Look at the Xbox360, it lasted 8 years!

DooM_RO said:
At that price, you are better off waiting for the new consoles. PC gaming is only viable if you buy at least 1000$ PCs. A mid-range PC will not keep up with a console IMO because optimizations are so much easier on consoles because they all use the exact same hardware. Look at the Xbox360, it lasted 8 years!

Bullshit. First of all, define viability. If you're fine with playing on medium or medium-low, you can make do with a pretty damn reasonably priced PC. The reason why consoles managed is because they lock the games on ridiculously narrow FOV and low FPS. Personally, I'd much rather lower settings to keep the games fluid assuming I had to make that choice.

@KK: Prices in six month aren't easy to predict, but it's likely that they'll drop somewhat. Especially with NVidia recently releasing new cards on their next generation, the 600 cards might be getting cheaper.

Jodwin said:
@KK: Prices in six month aren't easy to predict, but it's likely that they'll drop somewhat. Especially with NVidia recently releasing new cards on their next generation, the 600 cards might be getting cheaper.

I'm going to keep an eye out for expos too, they usually sell stuff for cheaper.

DooM_RO said:
At that price, you are better off waiting for the new consoles.

Huh...what?! For a fraction of that price you can assemble a very expandable "all rounder" PC, whose gaming-critical parts can be upgraded at any moment and blow any console designed during this time.

Consoles, hardware-wise, are designed to be equal to a low-mid end PC of their era and then simply are more "viable" because the companies have them on a 10-year forced support cycle, on fixed hardware. This is even more true of "next gen" consoles: they are assentially a bunch of AMD APUs, of the kind you find on budget AMD FM1/FM2 mobos.

Edit: Also, I'd leave out the SSD as a boot drive if I were you. It doesn't give that much of a boost compared to a normal HD with a good cache and read speed. Besides, if you'd only get a small SSD, you couldn't make use of it where it really matters for gamers, which is loading speeds for games. Sure it's a nice-to-have, but far from a necessity.

SSD is awesome for other things though. I don't feel like waiting dozens of minutes for applications to install when I have HDD, or to wait 3 minutes for Windows to finish loading (while I look at the empty desktop) unless later HDDs are much faster.

But for heavy games? You'll run out of space if you choose a SSD. Think of the 32GB-sized SDK of Rage, and released games wouldn't be much smaller.

printz said:
SSD is awesome for other things though. I don't feel like waiting dozens of minutes for applications to install when I have HDD, or to wait 3 minutes for Windows to finish loading (while I look at the empty desktop) unless later HDDs are much faster.

I have one of these as my boot drive, I'd assume using an SSD might save five to ten seconds on boot which is not worth the roughly $80 that a small SSD costs if you're building a PC on a budget. That's money better spent somewhere else for the pretty irrelevant gain.

A few points:
- Even a netbook shouldn't be taking longer than a minute to load Windows 7. Mine didn't.
- AMD has a price point that Intel/nVidia can't beat, which is a fine tradeoff for some statistically insignificant incompatibility or performance incidence that you will never experience in day-to-day use.

Having just used a PC with a SSD, I think I'm with the article's author. The difference is like night and day, in many if not most circumstances. Keep in mind that my PC is fastidiously maintained, and its mechanical drives run optimally.

GB per $ is the only arena in which traditional drives have the edge. But in a few years that might change.

Maes said:
You must have a really shitty and/or badly fragmented and/or malware-laden and/or startup-heavy computer for this to happen on a machine with more than 1 GB of RAM, at least with Windows XP.

Okay, maybe I exaggerated. Not 3 minutes. Rather one. Or 30 seconds. Anyway, I prefer the time while I wait at desktop not to be longer than 10 seconds. I know that Windows 8 solves this problem by shutting down lightly, but I can't do it because the PS/2 keyboard will then wake it up. I also am careful not to install voluntary malware. If hidden malware still installs without me receiving any warning, but i have antivirus, then what the hell — i have to also take that into account when i consider computer speed.

On the 9 year old Win XP Celeron computer with 1.5 GiB RAM it surely lasts even 5 minutes or more to load. It was fast when it was young.

ON TOPIC: I think you can get a pretty cheap gaming PC. For about $642 worth (peripherals not included; keep in mind it may be cheaper in the US), I got something with Intel Core 2 Quad, Gigabyte NVidia 9600GT, an excellent power supply that doesn't get noisy, enough RAM and enough drive space. Unless you put every single detail in the game, it should work nicely. However, take it with a grain of salt. I did test a few games newer than the PC, such as Starcraft 2, but I'm not really in the loop now. I hope that the console technologies will keep the game system requirements low.

Well this advice is irrelevant now, but personally I would always recommend a clean install after replacing the motherboard. WinXP always flipped its shit if I tried to use my existing installation after a major hardware change, and I can't imagine newer versions of Windows being any more flexible.